Sniper Monkey

There is no secret vent: why "Amnesia: The Bunker" is not an imsim

It's a good game, but curb your enthusiasm.

I saw a great twitter video where an indie game developer said:

goblinAmerica isn’t some boorish, lowbrow “shooter.” It’s actually a cerebral and complex “immsim” [sic], because it has:

1. Crouching in a shadow
2. Boxes move [physics interactions]
3. Big hallway / little hallway [a vent next to a door with a massive sign above it saying “SECRET VENT”]
4. Realistic AI [an NPC says “I just heard something but I’m too busy reflecting on my beautiful life to investigate it]
5. Nonviolent tools [shoots NPC with a gun and a caption “not dead, just sleeping” appears next to the NPC. Proceeds to do the same but this time it’s an assault rifle]

This outstanding satire reminded me of something about Bunker that for me disqualifies it as an immersive sim: there is no little hallway.

Bunker’s level design

At one point after the game came out and there was actual discourse around an FG game for once, I had a realization; Bunker had painfully linear level design. I busted out the game’s map, analyzed it, and compared it to Dishonored.

Dishonored always offers multiple ways of getting places and bypassing obstacles; even in chokepoint parts of maps, there will usually be at least 2 ways of progressing. Levels are rather open-ended and interconnected. Bunker, asides from side-rooms and 2-3 instances of a few adjacent rooms creating a sneaking arena, is predominantly linear.

You might say - comparing Bunker to Dishonored isn’t fair because Dishonored lets you jump 4 meters high and teleport. While yes, Bunker can’t have movement mechanics like that, it’s simply a matter of level design. Deus Ex achieves open-ended levels without any fancy movement mechanics. Giving areas more than one entrance can be enough. Bunker does not do this, unfortunately; the entire game has less than 10 rooms with more than one escape route, and every major area has a single entrance.

Bunker is advertised as highly replayable, but if offers you no variety. There are no alternate skills or paths to try. At best, RNG will give you a different set of items over the course of the game. You might not be able to play the levels out of order! On my replay I wasn’t able to because I got bad RNG and had no fire source to get through a tunnel filled with rats, and not enough other tools to get rid of all of them.

There are barely any alternate routes even on a scale as small as getting into a room with different methods. The only examples I can think of are:

• The hub wine cellar can be entered using either the bolt cutters or the wrench.
• The break room in Maintenance can be entered by shooting a padlock through a hole in the wall or by unscrewing a vent.
• A room in the hub can be entered through a hidden vent in the adjacent room rather than busting through the locked door. Which is less of an alternative and more a matter of which door you try first, but let’s say it counts.
• The locker room in the hub is entered through an already open vent - while it makes absolutely no sense, you could blow out the doors instead, so I wouldn’t actually count this.

Other than that, the only choice you are given in level progression is how you open doors and padlocks, and whether you want to risk busting into optional rooms.

Gameplay options

Bunker’s gameplay revolves around bypassing various doors and rat nests, both of which can be dealt with in several ways, which is admittedly in the imsim spirit. The options for getting through locked doors are:

• Heavy bricks which can break padlocks and wooden doors; it is only a particular brick type that can do it and it’s limited to 2 uses before it breaks. Limiting this mechanic to only one type of item is also not very immersive or intuitive.
• Padlocks can be shot off.
• Wooden doors can be blown up (grenade or drag a red barrel and set it off).
• Wooden doors can also be shot through, but this is too expensive to be viable because of the highly limited ammo.
• If a chain is used with the padlock, you can get bolt cutters to cut the chain off instead of dealing with the padlock.

The rat nests can also be dispersed with quite a few methods which fall into 3 categories:

1. Burn the bodies which attract the rats (there are many quite fun options of doing this)
2. Temporarily divert the rats elsewhere (meat, flares, gas)
3. Kill the rats (waste of resources because you won’t get them all with a single resource, but technically doable)

When it comes to combat… there is nice variety, but most of the nonorthodox methods aren’t effective. Carrying a gas mask to use gas safely could have been very interesting, but I found gas a quite unreliable in its ability to stop the beast. Similarly, you can do quite a lot with the pourable gasoline mechanic, but its ability to stop the monster is hit-or-miss. Exploding a barrel is effective, but it can be hard to time right and you will just end up wasting resources. I wish at least the first two were more effective, because they are completely overshadowed by bullets and grenades/molotovs.

Illusion of choice

While there is a fair few options of getting past locked door, typically you’re limited to only two. Padlocked metal doors can only be opened with bullets and The Brick. Wooden doors are usually locked from the other side (i.e. no padlock to shoot), so you need The Brick or an explosion to open them. Furthermore, RNG is king here; sometimes you will simply only have one option.

And when an actual choice has to be made, it is largely meaningless: from the standpoint of remaining undetected, all of the options come down to “loud noise = monster comes out”. Breaking padlocks with The Brick is the only exception (breaking a wooden door with it is still very loud). The only thing you really have to consider is “which one of these is better left as a weapon?”. To be fair, that’s still a compelling scenario, but not something that screams imsim to me.

Missing links

If you think it’s possible, it probably is.

– Bunker’s loading screen

At one point I felt super clever because I thought to myself: “hey, I’ve got a fuel cannister and a lighter. I could set that door on fire to avoid alerting the beast”. You can probably guess where this is going, but I did what I planned and… nothing. I suspect that FG couldn’t balance such an interaction properly so they cut it out (wouldn’t requiring a full canister to burn through a door be enough of a sacrifice to not make this overpowered though?).

This is not the only case either; you can’t make fuel bottles or fuel canisters explode by shooting them. The exit door needs to be blown up with a pack of dynamite, but an entire barrel of gunwpoder won’t do (understandable design-wise, but still). Reportedly, throwing The Brick at the monster doesn’t do anything. Probably quite a few more such cases.

And thus we arrive at my key points of this post. First: Bunker offers many gameplay options, but is a very linear experience (which is not imsim-like). If you come across a locked door, 95% of the time there is no alternate way in, and you will have to break it open. And to do that, you will have to attract the monster. The only quiet method is very situational and relies on RNG, so it will rarely be an option. And when it comes to combat, each time I tried thinking out of the box, I was met with subpar results and had to stick to guns, grenades and molotovs.

Second: Bunker does not create opportunities for thinking outside the box or being observant, which is a key characteristic of imsim games. The level design is linear, with very few clever hiding spots and no secret routes. On the mechanics side, it’s not hard to come across something that the game does not account for.

Bunker vs Darkwood

Comparing Bunker to Darkwood is something that I have been itching to do because both are survival horror games which feature fire/gasoline mechanics and keeping a generator alive to stay safe, which is a “weird that it happened twice” situation.

Darkwood also allows you to:

• drag furniture to barricade
• create traps with broken glass and poured gasoline, which can be lit with throwable matches and flares
• has gas bombs, although these are better used as explosives after being set on fire than as a raw poison damage source

At the same time, you can still blow up stuff and combine various mechanics to achieve better results. The level design is open-ended (although one might argue it’s too open to even talk about alternate routes). And yet, nobody is calling Darkwood an immersive sim; why is Bunker supposed to be one then? Just because it has a first-person perspective?

Counter-arguments

To play devil’s advocate - it’s not really in Bunker’s interest to offer many escape and entrance routes, because it’s a horror game and those extra routes would allow the player to evade the monster quite easily. The lack of resources limits choice, but creates scenarios where you can barely scrape by with your ingenuity, which works very well in a survival horror game. Because yes, I’d qualify Bunker primarily as a survival horror. Although it would be unfair not to acknowledge that it does have imsim elements.

In fact, why does it even matter whether it’s an imsim? I do admit that this is pretty much bikeshedding, but for me this categorisation, and the game bombastically telling us “if you think it’s possible, it probably is”, lead to letdowns. Instead of being pleasantly surprised with how many options there are for a survival game, I was expecting for something cool and emergent to happen and it never really did.

The sad part is that Bunker gets really close to being an imsim. The ingredients are here; all it really needed was an extra push in the level design department.

Closing words

So, what even is the point? I guess not to be overconfident with what your game really is. I’ll stick to keeping the imsim label for games where I can go “just like you said, lizard man. in the shadows to the left”.